How To Mend A Broken Heart
by CoolnRainy
Summary: A series of one-shots looking into each time Beckett broke Castle's heart.


**How To Mend A Broken Heart**

**Summary: **A series of one-shots looking into each time Beckett broke Castle's heart.

**A/N: **I will also write a companion piece – "How To Break A Mended Heart" for each time Castle broke Beckett's heart. I know, majorly depressing, but what can I do if they keep throwing all that angsty angst at us? Anyway, this chapter is placed in 2x01.

**x x x**

**Prologue**

Having his heart broken by Kate Beckett was undoubtedly the most unpleasant thing he experienced in life, and it didn't get easier with practice.

In fact, it got decidedly worse.

Every. Damn. Time.

**x x x**

**Chapter 1: The First Time Kate Beckett Broke His Heart**

"We're done."

The words had hurt, jabbed into his chest. She had warned him not to look into her mother's murder, had warned him that they'd be done if he did, but somehow he hadn't expected it, hadn't truly expected her to be that upset. Perhaps a little upset, a bit of a cold shoulder, but he had believed that the facts he had uncovered would intrigue her. That she would look past this indiscretion in favour of his success.

Ends justify the means, and all that.

But he had been wrong. Before he had had a chance to protest, she was storming her way out of the hospital, away from him. He tried chasing her, but she was too fast and his legs were too marshmallowy from shock and dismay. Mostly dismay.

Anyway, that hadn't quite been the moment she had broken his heart, but it had been the beginning. It had sucked, but he had remained convinced that he would be able to get her to change her mind. At first he had tried calling, but she predictably ignored or flat out rejected the calls. He waited, gave her some time – hoping to give her a chance to cool off – and then went by the precinct. He was, however, met by general cold shoulders. She had given him the most pronounced eye roll he had ever seen and stalked out.

He tried to follow, but was stopped by Ryan and Esposito.

"Come on, guys," he whined. "I just need to talk to her."

"Nothing doing, man," said Ryan. His hold on Castle's arm was firm, but his eyes were sympathetic.

"Yeah, she's not gonna talk to you," Esposito agreed.

"And she'll kill us if we let you follow her."

"And then we'll be pissed at you, too."

Castle sighed.

"You really think what I did was so bad?" he asked them.

"Doesn't matter what we think," Ryan said mildly.

Castle gave Esposito a particularly pathetic look, but Espo just shook his head in silent warning. It was buried, his involvement in Castle's meddling. A one-time thing, never to be spoken of or acknowledged. Which was fair enough, Castle thought. He bid them a gloomy goodbye and left, trying to think of something else he could do.

He was desperate, it was true.

He didn't want to lose this new aspect of his life. He loved it, actually loved it, almost as much as he loved the writing. His world was filled with riddles and new discoveries, strange characters, moving stories, and sparkling inspiration. He could apply his mind and figure things out, and feel that deep satisfaction of solving a puzzle and watching things get fixed.

And he really liked the people he got to work with. Even excluding Beckett for the moment, the general camaraderie among the cops was absorbing. He had never been part of anything like that before, part of a world where daily life and banter was set against a backdrop of fierce protectiveness. This was a team of people who faced real life daily issues, difficult, dark, dangerous … and made it through together.

Writing was a lonely business, and this … this was the very opposite.

And then, bringing Beckett back in. Because he could hardly not consider her. She was … everything that he loved about the job. All the things outside of her were personified within her. And there was more, so much more that he couldn't put into words. He had never felt such a deep undercurrent of connection with somebody that he hardly knew. He just recognised something in her, about her, and he wanted to be around it.

She was his muse for a reason, damn it, even if he couldn't quite put his finger on what it was.

He was standing on the sidewalk outside the precinct, stewing on these thoughts, when the call about the magazine article came. It had all been arranged already and he only faintly remembered agreeing to something like that a few weeks before. His first instinct was to tell them he had changed his mind, but then he realised it could be the perfect opportunity to reconnect with Beckett.

She would have to stay in the room, after all.

x x x

That whole plan had at first very nearly not worked, and then, with the whole murder thing, very nearly actually worked. He did everything he could, everything he could think of to get her to smile at him again. And she did, every now and then, just a bit. And she saved his life, too. Which wouldn't have happened if he hadn't taken the risk in the first place. So there.

_Why don't you cut yourself a little slack and just buy her some flowers?_

Stupid poker group. They didn't understand.

_You must really like her._

Or maybe they did. He tried not to focus on that part. He had one goal, and that was for her to forgive him. He needed this life to continue.

But now he was sitting in front of her and she was smirking after calling him Hooch and … well, he had missed that smirk, missed it so much, missed how she used it to cover the actual warmth in her eyes, missed how she didn't seem to think he could see it anyway. Missed when she forgot the smirk but the warmth was still there. Missed sitting here every day, missed the banter, missed the laughter, missed _her_.

And all that missing, it made him feel soft and pained in his chest as he looked at her, remembered her pain when she talked about her mom, and he just couldn't not bring it up, couldn't not try and get her to tell him _why_ she wouldn't give him a chance, get her to take the leap with him.

"It's because you're afraid, isn't it?" he found himself saying. He should have known not to, known to just accept possible forgiveness, known that he had to, at the very least, give her time before he broached the subject again. He should have known, probably did a bit, but he was Richard Castle, and he had never been able to curb his intense need to know things before. He couldn't not push.

And so his words came out and they pushed their way through her ears and into her reluctant heart, and the more he spoke, the more he tried to tell her that they _could do this_, together, that she shouldn't be afraid, the more he pushed her away.

x x x

Her words still echoed in his mind.

_What if I don't want to know? Did you ever think of that?_

Her voice had been shaking with repressed rage and pain, and it had stunned him into silence. He honestly hadn't thought of that, not really. He couldn't fathom not wanting to know, and judging by everything he knew about her, everything she had told him, every case they had ever worked together, every plea she had made for answers, for the truth … no, he couldn't fathom her not wanting to know either.

_You dredged up my past for you, Castle, not for me. And you're too selfish to even see it._

Was that true? He didn't even know anymore. He remembered asking Esposito to see the case file, remembered reading it, remembered the painful twisting in his stomach and the questions buzzing in his mind. Maybe it had become a bit about him, the intrigue, the yearning for the answers. But no, he hadn't asked to see it for him. He had stared at her disconnected wounded eyes as she had told him about her mother, and he had been overwhelmed by this protective need to fix things for her. Perhaps … that did make him selfish. It was his need, not hers. Maybe.

_We made a deal and I expect you to honour it._

The dark, measured, cold look she had been giving him. God, along with those dreaded words, the reminder that he was supposed to leave now and never come back, that had hurt most. The finality, the cold truth that this was it, that he was expected to leave.

He had been unable to speak, stared at her beautiful face, and that was when his heart broke at her hands for the first time.

x x x

His world was depressed. Even the air felt sluggish and prickly. He sat at his desk and typed with poor enthusiasm. He was writing a very depressing scene, too, and he was doing it well. But he wasn't proud of it, he wasn't pleased. His mood was dark.

This was about as bad as a break up, really.

_You must really like her._

Damn poker group, he thought crossly. He hated when they were right.

Luckily Alexis chose to come in at that moment, simultaneously saving him from any further analysis of his possible feelings towards Beckett, and providing him with a very important realisation about how very badly he had handled the whole situation.

There she had been, angry but also hurt. In pain, discomfited, trembling. He had done that to her, he had jostled her carefully constructed safety net, he had thrown past pain into her life as if it was a grenade. He had done it to her, and he hated that he had.

And, for God's sake, he hadn't even _apologised_ to her.

x x x

Of course, the beauty in remembering the ways she had broken his heart was in remembering the ways she had fixed it afterwards. This time, it was with a simple, "See you tomorrow."

But Jesus Christ, he had never heard such sweet, warm and glorious words in his life.

**TBC**

x x x

**A/N:** Thanks for reading, I'd love to hear what you thought.


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